Going through my “Contacts” list on my phone, looking for a number, I began to notice that quite a few of my contacts are no longer among the living. Of course, as I get older, this sort of thing should be expected, but it is, nonetheless, unnerving. Should I delete the information? Or is that akin to wanting to forget the person, to erase their memory, to light the match to begin their Viking funeral, set adrift on a wooden boat, amidst a sea of memories; flotsam and jetsam of my life, which reappear randomly in my dreams and memories, like bottled notes running aground on the beaches in my mind; sometimes gently in the sand, other times crashing upon the rocky crags.
I met Lee Moulton on Pine Street, in Burlington, Vermont, in about 1963. We were both four. He was playing in a mud puddle in front of his house. We looked at each other. Even with his face covered with mud, he looked friendly. The conversation, as I recall, went something like this:
“My name is Paul. I’m four,” I said.
“Mine is Lee. I am four too,” he answered. “Let’s be friends.”
“Best friends,” I added.
And so, it came to be. We did indeed become best friends for the next six years, until he moved away. One of the best friends I’ve ever had.
On a spring day, in first grade, I was walking home from school when I saw Lee sitting in the grass of a neighbor’s yard, crying his eyes out. A bigger boy stood over him, laughing cruelly. He had Lee’s schoolbag open and was pulling out crayons, one by one, breaking them in half before tossing them over a white picket fence. I recognized the bigger boy as Emil P., a Hawaiian boy whom I had declared my “emeny” to my dad the year before. Emil, it seemed, had a thing for violating other kids’ schoolbags. He used to take the cookies out of mine while we were in kindergarten. When I reported this to my Dad, he told me the next time it happened, to punch Emil right in the nose. Which, in fact, I did. Learning a valuable lesson that has stuck with me to this day: Bullies are all cowards, even six-year-old bullies.
“Wah!” cried Lee as Emil tossed another crayon over the fence. “That blue crayon was my best one.” Right about then, Emil looked up and saw me. Time stood still as the halves of the blue crayon landed softly on Mrs. Porter’s lawn. We locked eyes like tiny gunfighters, squaring off under a cloudless April sky. What may have been a lone coyote howled in the distance, and a tumbleweed blew across the barren plains of Home Avenue. I saw Emil’s lips curl in fear, perhaps remembering last year’s pummeling he’d received for committing a similar crime. His hands balled into fists. Lee sat in the grass, holding his breath, mid-sniffle. There was a decision to be made at that exact moment. Would I wear the grey hat of apathy, the black hat of the bad guy, or the white hat of law and order? My decision came quickly. I tackled Emil and tussled with him in the grass. I remember seeing the buttons flying off his shirt as we rolled on the lawn.
I ended up on top, and in hearing the word known by all little boys, I relented when he let out a defeated: “Uncle!” For that day, Emil and I were pals, walking home together, arms around each other’s shoulders. But this friendship was short-lived. Over the next six years, Emil and I fought often. He was the class bully, and I would always stick up for the smaller boy. The premise had been set. I was the United Nations, keeping the peace.
Saint Anthony’s closed after sixth grade, and we ended up at public school for seventh grade. Lee had moved away, and I was now a junior high school student. Emil, meanwhile, had hit early puberty. He was maybe 6-foot-1, 220 lbs, and sported a beard … at twelve. Thankfully, he seemed not to remember our former roles, or he could have pounded me into Mrs. Porter’s lawn like a tent stake. The next year, my family moved to California, and I never saw Lee or Emil again.
But I never forgot them, either. The bottles containing their memories would wash ashore in my dreams for the next half-century. I never forgot how easy it was for the six-year-old me to take a stand for what was right. I never forgot the feeling as I entered the fray. And with the advent of the internet, every year or so, I would Google Lee Moulton, without success. I vaguely remembered that “Lee” was a nickname, and without his given name, locating my friend was a fool’s errand.
Surprisingly, I found Emil’s name easily, and after considerable thought, decided to send him a “friend request” via Facebook. He accepted it in mere seconds. We texted back and forth for a few weeks. He had turned out to be a great man. We got along famously, never bringing up our battles of yesteryear, the ones hanging out in the sea of my unresolved memories, bouncing off one another in the waves of my dreams.
Emil Pornelos died from COVID within a couple of months after accepting my friend request. He was 62. He wanted only to talk about his family in the months that I got to know him as a man. He loved the Bible and his grandkids and wrote about both tirelessly.
Just this past August, I had a dream straight out of nowhere. I guess one of the bottles broke open on its own, reminding me of something important: Lee’s real name. Joseph Leo Moulton. It was 4 am. And I knew I would forget it if I didn’t write it down. Instead, I Googled it. It came right up … his obituary. He had died three weeks before.
And so I write this column for a couple of reasons: to remind you, dear readers, to open the bottles within your memory and read the names of the notes within, the names of your childhood, your formative years, your past. Use the internet for the best reason of all: to reach out and find the people who became part of you, the threads forming the fabric of your soul. Reach out and touch them while you still are able to. Put your arms around your “emeny’s” shoulders, pick up the broken crayons from the lawn of summers past. Try to know and remember people for what they have become, not what they were. And I write this column for my best friend from long ago. While I know we will meet again, I offer this as a Viking funeral to him and to those departed family and friends, who shall live on forever in my mind, as well as my contact list.
Whereas you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow.
“For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then disappears.” James 4:14